From now on, once a month, we will take one question, theme or prompt and post our thoughts on it. Follow the hashtag on twitter to get different points of view, receive some advice, join in the debate, or just for chuckles.

I’ll be honest with you, you’re very unlikely to find much useful insight from me, but I can guarantee some rambling, some borderline-offensive generalizations about parisians, some self-deprecation, some ranting, and maybe some original drawings if I fancy it.

You know, my usual stuff.

But for those of you who stumble upon my blog but are looking for some substance, I am happy to say that I can now refer you to the club members above!

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This month’s topic is a hypothetical situation in which one discovers that one’s significant other keeps an active profile on an online dating site.

Well, if I were seeing him casually, I’d probably let it go. If I were in a serious relationship, I’d take it as a sign that I should get out of said relationship. Anything in between, I can’t say that I’ve even the foggiest idea about my reaction. If he were French, I’d… HAHAHA… Man-shopper? Dating a Frenchman? <insert cynical laughter here>

In any case, these responses contribute nothing to the debate on the topic.

Frankly, I don’t really know what I would do, but I have a few thoughts about what I could do, which is ultimately much more interesting.

The list of things that my friend, Ryan (the Wandering Menace), has forbidden me from talking about on a first date — the things that she assures me will likely cause the guy to back away slowly or, in the extreme case, to run for the hills.

I’ve come to the realization that I am a lucky, lucky lady. It’s been over four months since I signed up on the adopteunmec dating website, and I have not once experienced any the following undesirable situations, all of which people assure me are common occurrences on the site.

As an online-dater, I have never been

sent photographs of his ass;

sent photographs of his penis;

asked for skype sex;

sexted;

sent any lewd, inappropriate, or otherwise non-G-rated electronic messages of any kind.

Therefore, I must conclude that there must be something about my profile that deters these fuckers in the first place.

So for the past month, I have been conducting side experiments to answer this question: what will it take to attract pervy internet prowlers?

Thus began Operation Perv-Magnet.

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EXPERIMENT #1

I erased all the text in my profile except “American in Paris”

That means that the man-products don’t know that I work in academia, they don’t know that I like crosswords, and they don’t know that I am looking for someone with “intelligence, humor, ambition, and sincerity.”

RESULT:

The traffic on my profile increased five-fold. I received three times as many charms per day as I did before. I saw an increase in the number of emotional and pathetic messages.

Overall, an interesting result, but no pervy messages or pictures as I had hoped.

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EXPERIMENT #2

I slutted it up

I kept the rest of my profile blank, but I filled out the questionnaire section about my sexual preferences — everything from my favorite type of panties to my sexual position of choice. I was very methodical; I just ticked every single box.

I actually checked so many items that the system refused to acknowledge all of them and kept dropping a bunch of them from my profile. It was some sort of system bug, and I gave up trying to resolve the issue.

Needless to say, I learned some choice vocabulary from all this…

RESULT:

My profile traffic doubled. No surprise there.

But the most entertaining outcome of this experience: so many messages that I received included some variation of: “I was attracted to you after reading your profile.”

However, still no perviness!

After all the work I put into sluttifying my profile, this was disappointing, to say the least.

n.b. Scroll down to the end of this post for the French-English vocabulary breakdown… in case you’re curious or in case you actually need to know.

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EXPERIMENT #3

I went blonde

After the failure of Experiments #1 and #2, I had to pull out all the stops.

I changed my primary profile picture to one in which I was dressed as Marilyn Monroe for Halloween.

In other words, this Asianista went trashtastically platinum.

After many drinks, this also doubled as my Tila Tequila costume... And no, I won't post that picture here.

RESULT:

My blonde profile picture only lasted 24 hours before it was taken down by adopteunmec’s site administration. Apparently, my photo was flagged for one or more of the following reasons:

“it does not look like me compared to my other photos”

“it is not an accurate representation”

“it contains provocative material”

I was miffed. But highly amused at the same time. Provocative? Who, me? Or that blonde tart in the photo?

Although Experiment #3 was cut short because some asswad reported me to the authorities, I was at least able to gather some data during the 24 hours that my blonde profile was active.

My profile traffic definitely saw a significant boost, and I did receive quite a number of messages in which the man-products extolled my lovely “hair.”

Men do love blondes.

However, I did not achieve the intended goal of attracting internet riffraff. Operation Perv-Magnet failed yet again.

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CONCLUSION

Short of begging for pervy pictures in my profile, I did my best to bring out the pervs. Therefore I must conclude that I may inherently be a perv-deterrent — regardless of whatever my profile says or looks like.

I know that this is a good thing.

So why am I a little disappointed?

Because I am a bored singleton with a twisted sense of humor.

Oh well. On to the next… non-perv…

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Sexcabulary à la française

boules de geisha [f.] – geisha balls obviously, but also known Ben Wa balls… if you don’t know what these are, here’s a link to a tame wikipedia article

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About me

I'm a twenty-something American woman who tried to make sense of dating and romance in Paris -- or the lack thereof. The Frenchmen were products on the shelf, and I was a shopaholic. But the social experiment continues in D.C., now that I'm back in the USA and on the prowl for new (American) toys to play with!